


The Life And Times of One Boots Arbuckle

by Letter_from_the_refuge



Category: Newsies (1992), Newsies - All Media Types
Genre: Fire, Fire mention, Gen, Great Depression, Life Lessons, Post-Strike, Quite sad!, Titanic - Freeform, reflective, triangle shirtwaist factory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-17
Updated: 2020-05-17
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:02:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24241756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Letter_from_the_refuge/pseuds/Letter_from_the_refuge
Summary: A look back at the ongoing life of Boots Arbuckle. Other notable historic events him and the other Newsies lived through, his friends fates, and tragically mentions the death of many others. Follow their story through the 1930s, 40s, 60s, and today.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 6





	The Life And Times of One Boots Arbuckle

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for this tumblr post back around 2015: https://letter-from-the-refuge.tumblr.com/post/148679882533/letter-from-the-refuge-queenofbrooklyn

> ”Seriously though, I want to talk about Newsies.
> 
> I want to talk about which Newsies don’t have English as a first language
> 
> and which Newsies wait anxiously in front of Ellis Island seeing if today would be the day their family would come. 
> 
> I want to talk about which newsies are distrustful of everyone in the city, including other newsies. 
> 
> I want to talk about what the newsies wanted to do with their lives when they were little and before they realized life already had them pegged in poverty. 
> 
> I want to know which ones eventually had daughters and nieces that were trapped in the Traingle Shirtwaist Factory fire. 
> 
> I want to talk about which newsies felt like life kept hitting them with blow after blow, not realizing they accidentally made it into every big headline of the early 1900s from the strike to the fire to a connection to Titanic. Which newsie somehow got connected to it all?
> 
> Lets talk about Newsies.” ~[queenofbrooklyn](queenofbrooklyn.tumblr.com)

I have this really weird feeling that if anyone was there for all of it, it was Boots. 

He was only about 11 (no one knew for sure) at the time of the strike, yet still seemed to have been through as much as any boy much older than him involved. In order to make his fair share at a living, he sold newspapers, shined shoes, and sometimes ran coffee for reporters if there was a large conference in the area (which was quite frequently, with this being turn-of-the-century Manhattan and all). Wether it was due to America’s blatant racism or not, it took him two jobs to make as much as any of his blonde-eyed, blue-haired colleges. The third job, however, left him a bit better off than his brethren.

About twelve years post strike, Boots had started a business for himself with all the money he had saved up. He never did stray far from his roots: Mr. Arbuckle made quite a fine cobbler, while still managing to pawn off a few papes to costumes picking up their fancy new footwear. It was work, but business had yet to boom, and in order for bills to stay in the black, his wife Anna had to keep her factory job sewing shirts. She was only twenty-one, and could still pass as young enough to work for the Triangle Shirtwaist Company.   
That summer, funds from the shop were getting especially tight. Boots was about to loose what he had worked his whole life for, and was willing to do so to keep a roof over his wife and young daughter’s heads. Anna would not let that happen.   
Much to Boots’ protest, she took their daughter, having just turned six and old enough to be hired, to work that day, posing as “her little sister”.  
It was her first day.   
Boots couldn’t live with the grief.

If anything remotely well had come from the fire, it was that the collapse of cotton and wool industry left room for other clothing industries to take off.   
Especially leather.   
Especially a new product, invented by a young cobbler in lower Manhattan, coined, “tennis shoes”.

Within the year, Boots had twelve men working under him to keep up with demand, and his first ten-thousand dollars in the bank. He had only thought up the new shoe design from all the time he spent alone in his shop. Boots hardly went outside anymore. He still couldn’t bare the thoughts every time he passed a puffing chimney.

He went for advice from an old friend, the only other person he had known to go through such grief in his life: Jack Kelly.   
It was a cold autumn night, and the brisk New York air felt nice against Boots’ cheeks, after being in a stuffy workshop for so long. The leaves crunched under his feet as he made his way to the fire escape latter he had seen his friend climb so many times when they were growing up.   
He saw a large, happy family cuddled around a fire, laughing. He sat there, not sure if what he was feeling was awe or jealousy, or both, for what seemed like ten minutes before finally tapping the window three times, as Jack’s letter had suggested.   
Jack Kelly, now 30 years old, with bags under his eyes and a full beard and mustache, emerged from under the glass panel a moment later.   
Jack and Sarah had inherited the Jacobs’ old apartment, and stayed there with three young children of their own to take care of, along with Sarah’s aging father. David had moved across the hall, into the apartment that used to belong to an old Polish woman who would make the newsies cabbage rolls to warm them up on nights like tonight. Boots could almost smell them now. He wanted his pal Les to join their conversation, but he was away for military training.   
“Listen, B. I know you’re upset, anyone in their right mind would be. But it’s been almost a year now. If you don’ snap out of it soon, you won’t make it through the winter. How you are right now, that ain’t living. You gotta find something to distract you from it, I dunno, like, something big.“

"How did you do it?”  
“How did I do what?” The older man asked, genuine confusion in his voice.   
“You know, after your brother. You were devastated. How do you get over it?”  
There was a pause. The silence seemed to carry out over the City That Never Sleeps.   
“You’re right. I was heartbroken. I blamed myself. But that was before the strike. We had so much going on, I could hardly find time to mope about it anymore. Then I met these guys,” he motioned towards the window, “and everything changed.”  
“Yeah, but, how are we gonna have another strike?”  
Boots was the most street smart person you could ever meet, but he would probably flunk out of school in under a week, given the opportunity.   
“We ain’t got a strike, but there might be somethin’ bigger going on I could get you in to,”  
Their was so much eagerness in the smaller man’s eyes that Jack could have sworn it was still eighteen ninety-nine and they had their whole lives ahead of them.   
“You seen all them banners about the ‘worlds biggest cruise ship’ going around? Ol’ Spotty’s been working construction on it for a couple years now, I figure he can hook you up with a room real cheap,”  
“But I don’t, I won-”  
“Listen, just relax. The more you have distracting you, the less you’ll think about them. I know it hurts, but this is killing you man. Just do this. For me. For me and for all of us out here looking out for ya.”

It was 12:06 by the time the sirens had woken Boots up in his second class berth. Shit.   
Being the kind soul he was, boots helped to load everyone else on board to a lifeboat before him. For the third time in his life, Mr. Arbuckle was sure he was about to give his own life to save those he cared for. Which was, in fact, everyone.   
Boots and a deck officer were placed in charge of loading lifeboat number seven. The boat was meant to hold 65 people, and according to Spot, their were supposed to be room in the rafts for everyone on board. Whomever was in charge didn’t listen to the plans, Boots found out via the A deck broadcast. There were only 20 boats aboard, instead of the needed 32.   
Someone had to stay back.   
Someone was going to drown.   
Boots would do anything to make that number as small as possible.  
First they helped the children aboard, then the women. That was when the speaker said, “white men board before the negroes.”  
Those were words that sealed his fate.   
The horrible system that had cheated him as a child, that had left him with nothing, that had taken away his wife and daughter, that he finally thought was going to turn things around for him, was going to take his own life as well.   
Boots grasped the locket around his neck that used to belong to his wife.   
“I’ll see you soon, Annamarie,”

There was so much going through Boots’ mind that he could hardly think. He tried to load as many passengers, however unfairly, as he could as quickly as he could. Boots’ boat was one of the few that contained both races, or so he thought.   
As Boots was helping an elderly black man climb on board, an angry, heavy-set white man started untying the rope keeping the boat in place, shouting, “not on my watch.”

It was all his fault. The boat could have held 65 people, and left with 27. 27 people. That was at least forty more lives that could have been saved, and they weren’t. “And it’s all my fault,” boots thought out load, before collapsing to the deck. He was shouting, panicked, overcome with emotion. That was when the water started to reach his hips. He was seated at the highest point on the deck. He thought his relief had finally come. That was when he thought about Jack. And Les, and Spot, and all the boys he knew when he was young. What were they going to do if he passed. Would they sob? Would they fall into the same depression he had? Boots was not going to let that happen. “Spot! That’s it!” He exclaimed, almost giggling at the fact that he forgot. All those trips to Brooklyn did have their benefits, it turns out. Spot had taught Boots how to swim in the harbor all those years ago, and Boots could swim /well/, if he could remember how to do it.   
Peril tends to hasten motion memory.   
It was cold in the ocean. Bone-chillingly cold. But Boots knew what direction his boat had left in, had known there was room left for him, and knew that with it leaving only eight minutes ago, he could easily catch up.   
It took all his might, and all his strength to catch up, but he made it.   
Boots Arbuckle survived the Titanic.

Jack was quite right about distractions helping to heal you, but this was more of a distraction, and more of a hurt, than either of them could have possibly imagined.

Boots went back to his recluse, but his shoe business continued to blossom for the next nineteen years. He thought he was finally done with all the horrors in his life. He thought wrong.

The year was 1932, and the stock market crashed entirely. Boots had been giving money to his friends in times of trouble for years to keep them afloat, now he wouldn’t be able to afford a sandwich for himself, unless he sold the shop.   
The cobbler shop was all he had, but if he were to truly move on, like Jack had told him all those years ago, this was the next step. The only issue was, trying to find a buyer during the Great Depression was no easy task.   
At long last, Boots came across a German man trying to find an American product to take back to take back for sale in his homeland.   
There was only one condition: if Mr. Dassler were to purchase the company, Boots would have to allow him to change the name on his patents.   
Boots was desperate.   
He eventually gave in.   
“Boots A. Arbuckle” was painted over, and the name “Adi Dassler” was inked in its place.   
Boots had lost all he had. He would never be remembered. He had nothing.   
He was nothing.   
Kid Blink came down with tuberculosis that winter. Boots put his very last dollar, his lucky dollar, his first dollar; into the tin for his old leader’s medical treatment. He passed later that week.

Nothing ever did lighten up for Boots Arbuckle.

Les Jacobs passed away in 1952 during weapons testing for the Cold War.   
His family couldn’t even afford a proper funeral. Boots couldn’t see his best friend of so many years buried in an unmarked grave.   
He went around the entire city collecting funds. Old and aching, Boots carried a little red tin bucket along his old route, from Brooklyn to Upper East Side, and everywhere in between.   
He raised enough to give the Jacobs’ a monument.  
It was the least he could do for the folks who kept him alive.

From there on out, Mr. Arbuckle became an avid collector for the Salvation Army. It brought back everything he had loved when he was young: he was active, he never had to sit indoors, and he got to talk to all kinds of different people every day. He didn’t even have to worry about keeping food on the table. It was a mighty fine life, indeed.

Jack Kelly passed peacefully in his sleep at the grand old age of 69, about a year after Les. Jack had made two requests when he passed: that his old cowboy hat be given to his grandson Gene, to remind him to always follow his dreams; and that the red bandana he had worn around his neck all these years be given to Boots, to remind him, though the colors may have faded, to always look on the bright side of life.   
Sarah Jacobs-Kelly passed the very next night, after quoting, “this day without Jack has been the worst I’ve ever lived.”  
They were buried in a plot adjacent to Jack’s younger brother, an aisle away from Les.

Around the year 1962, Boots found a way to finally get back at the system that had taken so much away from him in life. He had been an avid supporter in the Civil Rights Movement from when he was very young, but never before had they had an actual chance at succeeding. Boots rode his first airplane that year, from New York to Washington, D.C., to participate in a March with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a distant relative of his late wife.   
He did it for her.   
He still wore her locket around his neck.   
Boots was locked in prison for three weeks, and then again on five separate occasions that year. He wouldn’t rather be anywhere else. He hadn’t had this much fun since his own strike, all those years ago.

The very last boy from the strike passed away in January, 1968. Boots was the only person to attend Snipeshooter’s funeral.

He lived a sad life, but not a bad one. Boots did everything in his power to stick to Jack’s last words of advice, like he had with every one of his wisdoms before that. He realised that he couldn’t change anything, but that the here and now are the best place to be, and he wouldn’t change that for the world.

Around 1985, Boots managed to re-purchase the apartment he and his wife had shared all those years ago.

It’s said that some days, when the air is crisp and the autumn leaves are just dry enough to crunch when stepped on, you can still see Mr. Arbuckle out on his fire escape, above the Adidas store on East Houston Street and Bleekers Avenue. If you ever see an older man in a tattered red bandana and a heart-shaped locket, tell him thank you, for all he’s sacrificed. He’s known to crack a smile, and give advice as good as the word of God himself.


End file.
